Changing the game: Advancing transgender and gender non-binary inclusion in locker rooms

Although a number of scholars in fields ranging from gender studies to biology have asserted that the fluidity of a two sex, male/female binary cannot adequately address the complexity of biological sex and social gender expressed by humanity, binaric gender remains ubiquitously assumed with Western society. Perhaps nowhere is this assumption more rigorously enacted than in the locker room. I begin by describing my own experience in locker rooms, as an elite trans athlete competing on the Canadian women’s boxing team. I will describe how this experience was shifted through my encounter with the installation of a disruptive pedagogy project, The Change Room Project (Fusco, Milman, and De Lisio, 2015). I will outline how my own graduate research project emerged from this encounter. For my Master’s research (ongoing), I interviewed 12 trans individuals who reflect the diversity of this community with regards to racialization, ability, body size, age, and class. Finally, I will identify the complexity of strategies used by trans individuals to navigate the locker room and I will outline a set of practical recommendations for institutions seeking to make locker rooms more inclusive for trans individuals.

Session: Sporting Geographies #2
Transcending All Terrains: Engaging the Methodologies of Black Geographies and Indigenous Land Education to Examine the Places of Sport
This presentation advocates for an epistemological shift in sport sociology’s explorations into the landscapes of modern sport, one that centres Black Geographies (McKittrick, 2006; McKittrick & Woods, 2007) and Indigenous land education (McCoy, McKenzie, & Tuck, 2016; Tuck, McKenzie, & McCoy, 2014). In this presentation I overview how many discussions of place, both within and beyond our discipline, tend to undermine the importance of the ecological and Indigenous contexts in which place is situated. Additionally, as Katherine McKittrick (2006, p. xiii) points out, traditional approaches to geography tend to dismiss Blackness and Black people as “ungeographic.” This article proposes two methodological interventions into the geography of sport, Indigenous land education, a transdisciplinary methodology centering Indigenous cosmologies of land, and Black geographies, an approach to cultural geography which centres Black spatial politics and practices. This presentation argues that placing these methodologies as the axis of future explorations into sporting geographies enriches the conceptual frameworks available and expands possibilities for attending to social justice.